The weird sisters immortalised in an even weirder novel

This review of Suzanne and Louise by Hervé Guibert appears in the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Suzanne and Louise’s meals sound like something from an Iris Murdoch novel. For dinner Suzanne takes soup and compote; Louise, Camembert and chocolate. Saturday lunch is raw horse steak covered in powdered sugar, washed down with sparkling wine. For Louise it’s a change from her previous life as a Carmelite nun, where she lived on a diet of mashed chestnut stew, self-denial and one letter from the outside world per month. For Suzanne, whose husband used to put vanilla ice cream in his omelettes and wrapped up the leftovers to take to his mistress, being fed is an important part of her schedule. She is ill, old, fragile, moneyed. Forty years previously she retrieved her younger sister from the convent and brought her to an hôtel particulier in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where Louise could become her ‘tyrannical maid’.

As Murdoch knew, the recluse is of great dramatic use to the novelist: whatever has impelled them to retreat from the world is liable to fester and occasionally explode. French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert was given the gift of two such characters in the form of his elderly great-aunts, who riveted him so much that he tried to capture them more than once. He wrote a play about them (Michel Foucault and Michael Lonsdale did a reading, but it was never produced). He filmed them. And in Suzanne and Louise, first published in 1980 and now for the first time in English, he created a ‘photo novel’ about the pair. In this bravura, melancholy work, portraits of the siblings are interspersed with passages of reminiscence, fantasy and fact; their own memories and stories sitting alongside Guibert’s shrewdly observed vignettes. Now and then the rug is twitched away, the reader-observer reminded that this is not documentation but an ongoing act of collusion.

Guibert opens his work in the third person. ‘Suzanne tells tales of stinginess, of remembrance, of suffering. She says: “I’ve never loved anyone but myself” […] Louise tells tales of drunkenness, asceticism, death. Since the pharmacy was sold, no one comes to see them anymore, except their grand-nephew.’ He casts himself as an interloper into their clockwork life. ‘They don’t speak to each other, except when he comes to see them, every Sunday. They don’t ask him a single question about his life or his work […] They perform, for him, a dramatisation of their relationship. They seduce him; they are jealous. He keeps quiet and listens.’

From Suzanne and Louise by Hervé Guibert, published by Magic Hour Press

Although he begins as an observer, Guibert becomes increasingly willing to meddle. He casts himself as director and stage manager, sending letters to Suzanne in which he professes his ‘dream […] to photograph your body, with the same love I use to […] pluck your whiskers, or massage one of your aching muscles.’ After showing them the portraits he’s been taking, he coaxes Louise into undoing her tight Germanic braids, hair cascading forth in a way that feels shockingly intimate. He begins mailing them scripts each Saturday, describing how he wishes to photograph them the following day.

Plenty of photography claims to play with fact and fiction, complicating – or merely pointing to – the trading back and forth of power between witness and subject. But rarely is photography as unsettling as this. Two further gifts for Guibert: his great-aunts’ faces, granite-hard with mouths always slightly turned down, resolutely singular but similar enough to reward the game of compare-and-contrast when they are photographed together; and their willingness to give themselves fully to the camera.

Suzanne tells her great-nephew that when she dies, and her body is donated to the Faculté de Médicine, he can photograph her being dissected (‘something that speaks directly to a desire I had in our photographic relationship, one that I hadn’t even dared think about before’). Keen to defuse the distress this might cause, he proposes a trial run, asking her to simulate her death in advance. While taking the photographs, it is perfect – ‘the completion, the endpoint’ – but looking back over the contact sheets, Suzanne lying stiffly on her striped couch in a white nightgown, Louise standing at her feet, he is disappointed. The images are too busy, too forced. They are a failure.

From Suzanne and Louise by Hervé Guibert, published by Magic Hour Press

It is at junctures like these that the dance between images and words is most powerful, the story of Suzanne and Louise interleaved with evaluations of how the story is being told. Each medium offers something that the other can’t. A photograph can of course speak alone, but its message risks misinterpretation. Would these portraits feel as charged if we did not know about the sugared steaks or imagined cadaver on the dissection table; the artist’s disappointment or Louise’s laughter when she first reads the texts written to accompany her life?

Similarly, text can embroider or even transcend the images. At one point, Guibert envisages the shots he would have taken of the pair’s German Shepherd being put down, his prose compensating for the fact that he was not invited to see it happen – but it lacks that feeling of immediacy and mystery which lies beyond language. Let me describe an image from the book, by way of example: a gloomy, grainy black-and-white photo taken looking in through an open window, its shutters framing two elderly women, one braiding the other’s hair in a simulacrum of girlhood. It took me 30 words to get there and whatever you have in your head will only be the palest approximation of the image, which can be absorbed in an instant.

Guibert was just 25 when the book was first published. He died 11 years later in 1991 from AIDS-related complications, leaving behind an illuminating, exposing body of written and visual work. Suzanne had died in January of that year. He did not photograph her corpse. But in Suzanne and Louise he ensured the survival of an extraordinary artefact, frank in its admission of love’s inseparability from obsession and fascinating for its devotion to two women who accepted the camera’s gift of immortality.

Suzanne and Louise by Hervé Guibert (translated from French by Christine Pichini) is published by Magic Hour Press.

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.